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Canada's Massive Public Traffic Surveillance System
New submitter cqwww writes "A small magazine in Victoria, BC just uncovered a massive public traffic surveillance system deployed in Canada. Here's a quote from the article: 'Normally, area police manually key in plate numbers to check suspicious cars in the databases of the Canadian Police Information Center and ICBC. With [Automatic License Plate Recognition], for $27,000, a police cruiser is mounted with two cameras and software that can read license plates on both passing and stationary cars. According to the vendors, thousands of plates can be read hourly with 95-98 percent accuracy. ... In August 2011, VicPD Information and Privacy Manager Debra Taylor called me to explain that, even though VicPD had the ALPR system in one of their cruisers, the [Royal Canadian Mounted Police] ran the system, and I should contact them for any information. "We actually don’t have a program," Taylor said. "We don’t have any documents per se." ... A month later, Taylor handed over 600 pages. ... [The claim they kept no documents] was apparently only in reference to digital information. VicPD had kept 500 pages of written, hard-copy logs of every ALPR hit they’d ever seen.'"
Anyone of those can trigger the boys in blue to give you a tug.
Sigs. We don't need no steenking sigs.
The problem is they keep the logs, instead of comparing the read plates to a known search list and discarding the ones they were not looking for immediately. That way, they basically collect survelilance data on everyone "just in case they need it later". The only data that can not be misused is the data that does not exist, period.
They do occasionally find stolen cars. Mine was found after 3 weeks, sitting on a side street. They called me to come get it, didn't run prints or in any way investigate who might have stolen it, "just get it out of here"
At least they let you come pick it up -- in many cities they'll treat it as an abandoned vehicle and tow it and charge you the tow and impound fees:
http://blog.sfgate.com/cwnevius/2009/11/11/car-stolen-that-will-cost-you-300-part-ii/
In BC the car insurance is run by a government monopoly, so I guess it would be easier to pass them data. Having a well run single insurer is actually pretty efficient, as it lowers a lot of advertising and other overhead, but of course there are challenges in a system without competitive pressures to keep things in line, and a poorly run monopoly can be really terrible.
The cops aren't going to jump out guns blazing or taze the crap out of you just because the automatic plate reader flagged your car as possibly stolen.
Just like they would never pull someone over and end up tazing the crap out of them because their license plate frame was crooked.
Oh... well, er...
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Hate to point it out, but you're wrong on several counts. While even I, who am ALWAYS in the tinfoil hat crowd, don't have a serious issue with systems like this scanning for currently wanted vehicles, there is absolutely no reason to retain the information on non-matched vehicles. OK, your car gets stolen and you haven't reported it yet, or your straw-man kidnapped child incident happens and knowing that the car involved passed one of these things 30 minutes ago might possibly be useful in certain edge cases. Therefore, I would consent to retaining the information for a VERY BRIEF period of time--a few hours or so. There is just no reason to maintain it for weeks or months, and if they won't admit that's what they're doing--that's what they're doing. One problem with this is that nobody consents to anything--they just do whatever they want without asking or even announcing. That's wrong. It's even more wrong than having these monitoring systems in the first place.
Even if the people running this system and the officers involved have the purest of motivations and would never do anything wrong, the mere act of having a database that effectively can tell where certain vehicles were at certain times is going to present too great a temptation for others who will try to get their hands on it. Information, once collected, WILL be abused. It happens every time. Political hacks, future police state officials, divorce lawyers, private investigators, news reporters (if we have any these days) would all love to get their hands on this stuff, and if you allow the information to exist, they'll find a way. That's one reason why the agency that operates traffic monitoring cameras in my area does not record them (let's just say I've had the properly legal access and technical ability to verify this). Why? They don't want to have to deal with accident lawyers, divorce lawyers, etc. Even government officials in this case know what happens when you have a large database of stuff somebody else can twist to their own uses. Unfortunately, law enforcement in my area also has vehicles with this big brother license reader technology and they are much less forthcoming with what they do with the data. The system is, at least, reasonably easy to recognize on vehicles if you know what to look for. Stay behind them unless you're in an area with front license plates, in which case you're kind of screwed.
BTW, regarding your tickets--I guess it's your fault if you knowingly went over the speed limit, but you also should figure out if those speed limits were set according to proper engineering standards or by someone looking to increase traffic ticket revenue. There's a difference, and I would submit that the latter would absolve you partially of the moral blame here.
There's a lot of potential for abuse with this system:
1) They could track your every move. Where you shop, where you get your hair cut, when you go to the doctor, that you visit the hospital often (meaning you're being treated for something), that you eat fast food often, and WHO YOU MEET OR DATE (they could figure out you're gay, which many people prefer to keep secret).
2) They could make you guilty by association. If you have coffee at Starbucks every morning at 8, and so does a criminal, they could easily claim you're suspected as an accomplice and they could investigate you. Being investigated is not pleasant even if you are innocent. This makes police harassment easy if somebody in the police force or the government has an ax to grind against you for any reason.
3) They could find that you often drive near protests, night clubs, areas with gangs or drug traffic. They could make you a suspect even if you are not involved in those activities. "Probably Cause".
4) They could use info from points 2 and 3 to make your life miserable: investigating you is just one thing. They could put you on a no fly list (as the article suggests) or a surveillance list or whatever else...
5) They could track you at any time and stop you from attending protests, union meetings, elections, political meetings, business meetings, etc. If the cops want to be a pain in your ass they could choose to stop you for questioning specifically when you're on your way to an important business meeting.
6) If it's legal to record license plates like this, they could then extend the system to identify people's faces. It's easy to argue that your face is public info if you don't cover it in public and there are judges who would accept this argument.
7) They could put traffic cameras, bus/subway cameras or building security cameras into this. If they run out of vehicles, they could install cameras on city or government vehicles like fire trucks, garbage trucks, ambulances... They could even make contracts with private companies to install this system on their service vehicles (imagine every Fed Ex truck or every Taxi being turned into a surveillance vehicle). It all depends how much they want to watch people.
8) They could use the system to automatically flag you as breaking the law. For instance, they could calculate how much time it took you to go from point A to point B, and conclude that your average speed was slightly higher than the maximum speed limit you encountered on your trip. Or they might notice you've been driving in circles (e.g. you don't know the area too well) and accuse you of DUI. It's not uncommon for law enforcement to think "let's look for patterns in unlawful activity, and then conclude every occurrence of such a pattern is an indication of illegal activity and dismiss the possibility of a legitimate explanation".
To put it simply, this means they could be accusing you of a crime because a computer says you committed a crime.
It's too much power in the hands of the government/authorities. It may help fight against some crimes (and the original article claims it works worse than traditional methods) but this comes at a cost of bigger threats to society: government/police abuse (and in the worse case scenario: tyranny). Also, if the purpose is to find needles in a haystack, why keep data about every car? The software could just analyze every plate number the cameras spot, then discard "innocent" cars and only save data about the cars that police are searching for. Clearly this is a case of "You're assumed innocent now, but you may not actually be clean so we're keeping the data in case we need it later. You know, in case you suddenly decide to break the law".
And let's keep something in mind here: maybe the government today is well-intentioned. But what about in a decade or two?
Also, the police doesn't spend a ton of money on technology just to catch 100 stolen cars. Once they get the funds for the technology, they need to justify the expense and so they expand th
..and given how corrupt the VicPD is (i live here), i'm sure they will only use it for good... *sigh*
Search for this city and you'll find teenager girls physically abused in cells (with video), guys on the street assaulted for no purpose during arrest (with video), the list goes on and on. Or take a look at what's been going on with who's running the department.. A trusted PD they are not.